Not long ago all you could hear from Chipzilla was the mantra of the internet of things, but now that seems to be falling by the wayside.

Recently Chipzilla had a disaster with its Basis Peak smartwatch which had a nasty habit of getting a little warm. If you were serious about the internet of things you would worry about how this news would be treated. You would replace the watches and put it all down to a minor problem which only affected a few people.

However, Chipzilla did not do that. It recalled the lot and offered to pay back users’ money. It now plans to shut down the supporting cloud service by the end of this year.

The overheating problem could be the result of a chip design problem. Again this is a disaster if you are hoping to make a lot of money from the internet of things. One which should be handled, not by shutting down but by showing you know what you are doing.

Observers think that Intel is giving up on the new market segment. Earlier this year Intel announced it had stopped development of the SoFIA smartphone processor and cut back on Atom processor development.

In fact, despite being one of the loudest endorsers of the internet of things, Chipzilla has failed to make much of an impact. It has not pulled out completely, it just seems no longer interested the more consumer stuff and is focusing on industrial systems.

But its exit from the market is final. No one is going to believe Intel is really committed as it shuts down IoT based operations like its Peak cloud operations.

OK wearables always were going to be a non-starter at least until someone could find a product that everyone wanted. Apple claimed it was a watch... it wasn’t. The fitness market is going well but it is limited.

The Peak shows up Intel’s commitment problem. Until it caught fire it was not a bad object. In fact few people noticed any overheating problem and it had a good battery life. But Intel did not bother marketing it well and this is where it needed to pull its finger out.

But Intel does not appear to be able to do the consumer stuff, rather similar in fact to Microsoft. Although lately Vole has been getting better at it. Instead it looks like Intel has just pulled out of the consumer internet of things like it did mobile. It is fast running out of new areas to get into.

Geeksphone has announced that it has started to take pre-orders for its new Peak+ Firefox OS powered smartphone. Although it is just a minor upgrade when compared to its previos Peak smartphone aimed at developers, the Peak+ packs decent specs and will be available for consumers with a rather affordable €149,00 price tag.

As noted, the new Geeksphone Peak+ is just a minor update over the original Peak as it features the same 4.3-inch 960x540 IPS screen and powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 8225 S4 chipset powered by a dual-core Cortex-A5 CPU part clocked at 1.2GHz and paired up with Adreno 203 GPU. It still has 4GB of storage expandable via microSD card slot, 8-megapixel rear camera with flash, 2 megapixel front camera and a 1800mAh battery.

On the other hand, it did get 1GB of RAM which is double the amount on original Peak and uses a new exterior material that is better to the touch, according to Geeksphone. It also comes with Firefox OS 1.1 out of the box, the same update that both Peak and Keon recently received.

The Peak+ will be available for pre-order at Geeksphone site with a promotional price of €149 (around US $200). Geeksphone noted that the price will go up a bit once initial batch is sold but did not specify it. The pre-ordered units should ship out in September.